Of Meat and Men

Over the past fifty years, Paul Rozin, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania who coined the term “the omnivore’s dilemma” to refer to the moral and emotional hazards posed by man’s ability to eat anything, has made a comprehensive, Roald Dahl-esque study of food taboos, giving quantifiable dimension to a body of anthropological and ethnographic research that started with Sir James George Frazer’s “The Golden Bough.” His research often tests the limits of our willingness to eat, and involves experiments like presenting toddlers with Pepperidge Farm shortbread sprinkled with “grasshopper powder” (sugar, flour, green food coloring) and glasses of apple juice stirred by hair combs.

Rozin’s latest paper, “Is Meat Male?,” published last week in the Journal of Consumer Research, explores the metaphoric meaning of meat in Western culture. Specifically, is mammal muscle coded masculine? Are eggs, milk, and placentas thought to be feminine or feminizing foods? Is rawness more male than cookedness? (About the eggs: I thought instantly of two things. One was the trouble some friends have reported with eating eggs while pregnant. The other was the Los Angeles food truck called Egg Slut, which I last saw parked outside Lindy & Grundy, the married female butchers whose gender-role-reversing shop could be fodder for a Frazer monograph.)

As always with Rozin, you sense that he is having fun, getting undergraduates at Penn (presumably those enrolled in his Intro to Psych course, PSYC 001) to free-associate with the words “steak,” “chocolate,” and “beef” and questioning them about the maleness and femaleness of foods like raw beef, beef chili, broiled chicken, rabbit, sushi, and scrambled eggs. (Medium-rare steak, hamburger, well-done steak, and beef chili: most male; sushi, chocolate, chicken salad, and peach: most femme.)

Interestingly, when it came to ranking milk, eggs, and beef placenta, the research team found that “the data provided no evidence that these foods are symbolically linked to femaleness.” Processing food, on the other hand, lowered the perceived maleness of food; chicken salad was considered far less male than broiled chicken. (The hypothesis being tested was whether “foods that have received more culinary treatment, that is, are more distant from raw, as a result of being traditionally processed more by females, will be more psychologically female”; I wonder how much the lady-word “salad” factored in. What if the more processed food item had been duck confit?) Feminists, the study determined, were more likely to link meat and gender. When it came to their personal preferences, undergraduate women claimed to be more into chocolate, salad, fruit, and vegetables, while the guys gave higher “like” scores to beef, meat, and—go figure—orange juice. Rozin and his co-authors saw this as evidence of “gender identity maintenance”: women avoid foods associated with men in order to stay feminine. I wonder where that noxious-looking stuff Muscle Milk would fall—somewhere, maybe, on the list of substances banned to female Olympians.

Though the salad-chocolate/burger-steak divide doesn’t strike me as too revelatory—I remember it well, how meat-eating tends to be something women mature into (and then out of again), like brown liquors, usually in the “Girls” years, just post-college—I was surprised that organ meat wasn’t found to have much of a boy vibe. Liver, kidney, and blood scored low both for maleness and femaleness. In the restaurant world, there is an unmistakable aura of masculinity around the eating of bits—newly unhumbled cuts like heart, lungs, kidneys, tongue, and blood. Eating them is a measure of one’s daring, and a mark of commitment to a certain kind of experience-driven twenty-first-century dining; cooking them usually means having tattoos of pigs’ heads, knives, or foie-gras ducks on one’s own muscles. And yet: Chris Cosentino, the chef who, at his restaurant Incanto, helped pioneer the new offal in this country, has just come out with his first cookbook. “Beginnings: My Way to Start a Meal,” unexpectedly, is light on brains and balls—two of Cosentino’s standbys—and thick with wonderful-sounding recipes built around vegetables, herbs, and eggs. There is even one for grilled peaches.

Photograph by Carl de Keyser/Magnum.

Dana Goodyear, a staff writer, was on the editorial staff of The New Yorker from 1999 to 2007, when she began writing full time for the magazine.